Twitter Working On Self-Service Ads, Which Make Facebook And Google Billions

Twitter is planning on offering a
self-serve ad buying solution for smaller advertisers later this
year, the company's president of global revenue told
Mashable.

Right now, Twitter sells ads directly to the biggest advertisers,
which is fine, but a big part of the revenue of the web's
advertising giants, especially Google and Yahoo, comes from automated ad buying.

This allows small businesses and other small advertisers to buy
ads on the platform without having to dedicate a big sales force
to them.

But it's not just a smart and obvious way to increase revenue. It
shows that Twitter is now relatively confident it has found the
ad formats that work for it. Since they've been introduced,
Twitter's ad formats have been mostly "experimental": trying to
see what produces returns and what advertisers like. It's better
to do that when you just work with agencies and clients who know
online advertising and are willing to take chances and do
experiments with you on your big ad platform.

But to open to small businesses, you need to have figured out
what products work and which ones don't, and have standardized
them enough that you can offer them to anyone through an online
form.

One of the many ways in which Twitter is becoming a big, grown-up
company.